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<h1>Pellet OWL Reasoner</h1>

<h2>Contents</h2>

<ol>
  <li><a href="#intro">Introduction</a></li>
  <li><a href="#install">Installation</a></li>
  <li><a href="#running">Running Pellet (Command Line Version)</a></li>
  <li><a href="#using">Using Pellet in Applications</a></li>	  
  <li><a href="#building">Building Pellet</a></li>  
  <li><a href="#mail">Mailing list</a></li> 
</ol>

<a name="intro"/><h3>Introduction</h3>

<p>Pellet is an open-source Java based OWL DL reasoner. It can be used in 
conjunction with either <a href="http://jena.sourceforge.net">Jena</a> or
<a href="http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/">OWL API</a> libraries. Pellet 
provides functionalities to check the consistency of ontologies, classify the 
taxonomy, check entailments, give explanations, and answer SPARQL-DL queries. </p>

<a name="install"/><h3>Installation</h3>
<p>Pellet requires a JVM compatible with Sun's Java version 1.5 or above.
You can download Sun's JVM or SDK at <a href="http://java.sun.com">
http://java.sun.com</a>. If you have Java installed on your machine just unzip 
the Pellet distribution file to start using it. </p>

<a name="running"/><h3>Running Pellet (Command Line Version)</h3>
<p>Pellet comes with a simple command line interface to demonstrate some of its 
capabilities. This program provides options to check the consistency of an ontology, find unsatisfiable concepts, 
display the class hierarchy (with instances if desired), answer a SPARQL-DL query.</p>
<p>To run the command line version simply execute the following command</p>
<pre>pellet.sh help</pre>
<p>Running this command will print the options available.</p>

<a name="using"/><h3>Using Pellet in Applications</h3>

<p>You can access Pellet from Java applications using one of two different APIs 
designed to 
support <a href="http://jena.sourceforge.net">Jena</a> and
<a href="http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/">OWL API</a> libraries. The functionality 
in both packages is almost equivalent. See the javadocs 
for the details of interfaces and check out the <a href="../examples/src/org/mindswap/pellet/examples">examples directory</a> 
for sample code. You can find the answers to some Frequently Asked Questions in <a href="http://pellet.owldl.com/faq">Pellet FAQ</a>.</p>

<p>If you are interested in a GUI, you can use
<a href="http://www.mindswap.org/2004/SWOOP/">SWOOP</a> which uses Pellet for 
reasoning.</p>

<a name="building"/><h3>Building Pellet</h3>
<h4>Starting from a Distribution</h4>
<p>If you are starting from a distribution, Pellet comes pre-built, with
all the required libraries included in the zip file.</p>
<h4>Starting from Subversion</h4>
<p>To use the Pellet build system, you need Apache Ant, version 1.5 or above. You can download
a copy of Ant at <a href="http://ant.apache.org/">http://ant.apache.org/</a>.</p>
<h4>Compilation</h4>
<p>Running 'ant' in the trunk directory should be enough. The resulting 
files are placed in the directory dist/. Running 'ant zip' 
will build a source and binary distribution in the file 
dist/pellet-{date}.zip.</p>

<h4>Building your own distribution</h4>
<p>The ant target 'zip' will build the file dist/pellet-{date}.zip.
The ant target 'release' will build the file dist/pellet-{version}.zip.
You can change the version string by editing the build.xml file.  The 
distribution file will include the source code, the Pellet jar file,
and all supporting jar files found in the lib/ directory.</p>

<a name="mail"/><h3>Mailing list</h3>

<p>There is a mailing list for questions and feedback: pellet-users@lists.owldl.com.
You can subscribe to the list and see the archives here: 
<a href="http://lists.owldl.com/mailman/listinfo/pellet-users">http://lists.owldl.com/mailman/listinfo/pellet-users</a>.</p>

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